Four years ago, Rachel DeWos kin bounced onto the literary
scene with a funny, insightful memoir about a time just out
of college when she worked for a PR firm in Beijing. Much
to her surprise and delight, she was cast to play the part
of an American temptress in what became a wildly popular Chinese
TV soap opera called Foreign Babes in Beijing. While
DeWoskin’s book touched on many serious subjects, the plot
of the soap opera and her hilarious experiences while filming
were what swept readers along.

In Repeat After Me, DeWoskin has boldly sought to transmute
her knowledge of China and her very considerable writing talent
into fiction, this time by confecting a cross-cultural love
story between Aysha Silvermintz, a very troubled young American
English teacher in New York City, and Da Ge, an an irritable,
volatile young pupil, whose father has sent him away from
Beijing to protect him from the fallout of the Tiananmen Square
massacre in June 1989.

The novel presents three separate storylines. The first comes
in the form of Da Ge’s writing assignments for Aysha’s class,
and these reveal increasingly complex information about his
background, in modestly fractured English. The humor of his
language contrasts markedly with the events being related,
and this skillful creation is one of the most imaginative
parts of the book. The second narration is Aysha’s, in which
she tells what happens from September 1989, when she first
meets Da Ge, until August 1990, when he dies. The third account,
also Aysha’s, takes place in Beijing 13 years later, where
Aysha describes the life she and her daughter by Da Ge are
living. This story, too, follows the year from September to
August. The author juggles her complex structure very adeptly,
keeping all three accounts lively. Each segment involves and
affects the others, and yet DeWoskin cleverly manages to generate
and maintain a considerable degree of suspense.

It is not altogether clear at the beginning just how emotionally
wrecked Aysha is. While we see her playing obsessive mental
number games to determine whether things will work or blow
up in her face, and while her closest friend and her mother
seem preternaturally indulgent of her needs, it is not until
we are well into the novel that we discover she has actually
been hospitalized, following a total collapse. She’d discovered
her father’s affair with a young student and told her mother
about it, thus ending her parents’ marriage. Because we don’t
know this earlier, it’s hard to credit that Aysha would respond
as warmly as she does to Da Ge, whose sullen behavior is marred
by a lot more than problematic English. Even crediting Aysha
with being exceptionally open to every effort her students
make, Da Ge seems like a bad bet for intimacy. That he has
serious problems is apparent from the start, and the tragedy
of his life builds convincingly.

Aysha’s life in Beijing 13 years later, however, reveals all
manner of time-honored cures for the sufferings of 1989: motherhood,
friends, and a carefully established, close relationship with
Da Ge’s father. Aysha now enjoys a clutch of women friends—some
American, some Chinese—who all have daughters, and she has
a good university teaching job. There’s even a new man in
the wings, even if he is a little too perfect to believe.
Now, however, the language and cultural tables are turned,
for Aysha is the foreigner in a foreign land. This again provides
some humor—her errors appall and delight her totally bilingual
daughter—and it’s also an acknowledgment that it’s easy to
make foreigners struggling with English sound funny.

DeWoskin has down pat the many confusions and surprises of
cross- cultural difference and misunderstanding, but she also
succeeds in making them individual. Xiao Wang, a student of
Aysha’s in 1989, has come to live in New York’s Chinatown
in order to care for her elderly grandmother. It is only after
the old woman dies that Xiao Wang can finally return to her
husband in China and take up a career of her own. To Aysha,
Xiao Wang seems puritanically bent on sacrificing herself
to duty and high moral standards, yet when Aysha skates around
the truth of her parents’ divorce, fearing to shock both Xiao
Wang and her grandmother, Xiao Wang is quite matter-of-fact
and nonjudgmental about love affairs. Later, when Xiao Wang
and Aysha become friends in China, there appears to be as
great a cultural distance between the life of Xiao Wang’s
mother in South China and that of Xiao Wang and Aysha in Beijing.

The author has assembled a rich collection of characters,
most of them beautifully realized. But she doesn’t manage
to keep up with some of them, like Da Ge’s sinister uncle
or her own father for that matter, a nonrelationship that
creates the biggest, most inexplicable hole in the novel.

More than a love story about a man and a woman, Repeat
After Me is really a paeon to friendship among women and
to an ideal of family ties, manifest in this story between
Aysha, her mother, her daughter, and Da Ge’s father. The novel
may lack the humor of Foreign Babes, and it avoids
all the political threat that was just under the surface of
that memoir, but it’s a well-told complex story of interesting
people.